Service enablers are the basic technology building blocks for creating mobile services. The implementation of service enablers can potentially take place in many places along the end-to-end chain, i.e., from the mobile terminal to the fixed network server. Many new service enablers are needed to produce compelling new services and enable the next growth wave for the mobile industry.
The concept of enabling services has largely been perceived between a single service subscriber and a single content server. Often, multiple service subscribers are in need of a single service, where individual sessions between each subscriber and the content server are required. As such, large amounts of resources such as memory and transmission bandwidth are needlessly consumed from the server, since each subscriber requiring service additively drains the server's resources.
Many service enablers in existence today could be more effective and thus provide the subscriber with a richer experience, if they could be offered and managed in a group fashion. For example, any situation where groups of people are gathered together, whereby common information of interest may be accessed by every member of the group, would enrich his or her user experience by such common information. In such a group situation, service enablers such as browsing, delivery, messaging, content adaptation, chat, downloading, sharing, presence, etc., could be enhanced by the common information.
Inherent with mobile terminals, however, is their capacity to dynamically change their spatial orientation with respect to their surroundings. Due to changing circumstances, therefore, where one particular group orientation may be advantageous at one moment, that same group orientation may cease to be advantageous at the next moment due to member mobility. In other words, there are many situations in which group activity should be conducted in proximity to a region of interest for a fixed amount of time so that stimuli and content may be shared within the region of interest by locally associated group members.
Group tours in museums and group events in local drinking establishments are exemplary situations that are dependent upon local stimuli to determine the way in which one group member interacts with the other group members. For example, supplying a common link to interesting content pertaining to a particular painting that each member of a museum tour is viewing would be a valuable service that could be offered to members of that particular tour group. Alternately, supplying a trivia quiz to patrons at a local pub, whereby prizes are given away for the most correct answers, also requires location dependent membership, e.g., those patrons that are actually present at the pub necessarily care about a trivia quiz administered by the pub.
In the prior art, however, there exists no such mobile component that adaptively creates location based groups for special purposes. Group management has traditionally been coordinated through the use of group management servers, which are fixed within the network. Thus, spontaneous and flexible creation of micro-services has not previously been possible through the use of a mobile terminal acting as the organizer of the location based group.
Accordingly, there is a continuing need in the communications industry for a system and method that exploits the capabilities of mobile terminals to increase the number of value added services/micro-services that may be facilitated through their use. In particular, the capabilities of mobile terminals needs to be exploited, so that they may function alone to provide location based group formation activities, or alternatively, may coordinate with network servers to provide the location based group formation activity.